Free Full of Life by John Fante

thirty cents.
    “What’s going on?”
    “Take it easy, Papa. We got about eight miles to go. It won’t cost much.”
    He leaned forward in his seat. The streets of the city, the downtown throngs, had no interest. Only the meter held his attention. We reached Main Street. I pointed to the massive City Hall. The meter clicked.
    “It’s forty cents,” he said.
    We moved into Spring Street, with the Plaza not far away, and the Los Angeles tenderloin. Not many years ago I had walked these streets lonely and penniless. I had slept in the Sunshine Mission and snipped cigarette butts fromthe sand jugs in front of elevator shafts. There were days when I walked around without socks. Once I had been a bus boy in Simon’s on Hill Street, hosing out garbage cans, polishing brass rails. Those days had long since lost their appeal. I was glad to be away from cheap Temple Street hotels, two-cent coffee, and shaves in public lavatories with cold water and old razor blades. There had been days on those downtown streets when a single dollar bill in my pocket meant a time to relax from the fever of keeping alive, a time to slacken the pace, to take it easy for twenty-four hours. We passed Pershing Square. The meter clicked. Papa mopped his face with a large blue handkerchief.
    “She’s up to seventy cents. Let’s get out.”
    Beyond the Square was the all-night movie house where, for a dime, I used to sleep until five in the morning. Then they kicked us out, and I always used the fire exits, but the rubes staggered sleepily through the front door to be grabbed by cops and hauled off to Lincoln Heights Jail on a vagrancy charge. Once it had happened to me, and it could happen again, unless I worked hard, unless I took Papa’s advice and saved my money. The cab cruised up Seventh Street, the meter clicking every now and then, with Papa getting more and more panicky as the figures mounted.
    Pretty soon it got to me too, and I began to stare at that meter, frightened and fascinated. When we swung into Wilshire Boulevard it was nearly two dollars, and I was sweating it out with Papa. I had over a hundred dollars in my wallet but I was thinking about the old days, the desperate urgency of thrift now that the baby was coming, the irrevocable loss of pennies wasted. When the meter reached two dollars, Papa groaned in pain, swaying his head.
    “How much we got to go?”
    “A mile or two.”
    It was more than that. I had taken the trip by cab before and it was a five-dollar fare, or thereabouts, and it seemed fabulous now, too dear for such as I. We traveled on a few blocks more, and suddenly I could not bear it. I pounded the glass separating us from the driver.
    “Stop this cab. Right here.”
    Instantly he pulled over to the curb.
    “You ain’t there yet, bub.”
    “This is as far as we go.”
    “That’s your privilege.”
    He tore the price ticket out of the meter. It was $3.20. I paid it to the penny, no more and no less. The driver piled our luggage on the sidewalk and drove away. Let him sneer! A penny saved was a penny earned. Today it was fashionable to scoff at the homely wisdom of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller. I saw now that those great men were right.
    “Let’s go, Papa. It’s not far. Only a couple of miles.”
    He spat on his hands.
    “Now you’re talking, boy.”
    All credit were credit is due. But for Papa I might have been ground under, to fall there in some hot and unclean gutter, never to see my Joyce again. But for him the safari might have ended in complete demoralization, Mama’s heavy jars of tomato and fig preserves and an uncut chocolate cake abandoned along the trail.
    His was the strength of ten as we slugged along, the madness of the heat twisting my reason, the choking fumes of monoxide gas burning my parched lips. He carried his tool kit in one hand, a suitcase in the other, and a third suitcase under his arm. Twenty paces behind, I foughtthrough beneath the awful weight of the roped carton and my own